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Recent Faculty Accomplishments

Instructor Jeff Fearnside’s short story “Nuclear Toughskins,” from his collection Making Love While Levitating Three Feet in the Air, and Other Stories of Flight, was a Finalist for The Best Small Fictions 2017 (judged by Amy Hempel). His short fiction has recently appeared in Valparaiso Fiction Review in the Fall 2017 issue of North Dakota Quarterly. His poetry has recently appeared in About Place Journal, Naugatuck River Review, and the anthology Forest Under Story: A Decade of Creative Inquiry in an Old-Growth Forest (University of Washington Press).

Professor Evan Gottlieb gave the first Critical Questions lecture of 2017-18 at SWLF, on “Speculative Romanticism, or Wordsworth and Shelley in the Anthropocene”. He gave an invited lecture at the University of Colorado, Boulder: “Contingency Plans: Scott, Meillassoux, and the Waverley Novels after Correlationism”. His article was just published: “Vanishing Mediators and Modes of Existence in Scott’s The Monastery,” Yearbook of English Studies 47 (2017): 77-92. His Critical Questions talk was also reviewed in Prism Magazine.

Professor Anita Helle gave an invited talk, "Anne Sexton's Photographic Self-Fashioning," at the New York Public Library May, 2017.

Associate Professor Ray Malewitz's article,“It’s Time to ditch coal, not clean it” was published in the Washington Post (July 26, 2017) and he served as academic coordinator for the BNU-OSU Summer Workshop on Frontiers in Humanistic Studies.

Assistant Professor Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder recently published "Explain Like I’m Five: Technical Descriptions in the Wild" in Technical Communication Quarterly, and also published a chapter called "Methodologies: Design Studies and Techne” in the collection Rhetoric and Experience Architecture. Ehren's recent presentations include "Elusive Elegance in Data Displays" as part of the "Beautiful Science, Useful Art: Three Perspectives on Data Visualization" event hosted by the OSU Special Collections and Archives Research Center. He recently gave the 2017 Winifred Bryan Horner Memorial Lecture entitled “Persuasive Mobility and The Logos of Logistics” at Texas Christian University and presented “No-So-Still Life with Rhetoric: Hashtags and Risk Literacy” at the Conference on College Composition and Communication and “Mapping the Actors: Certificate Building as Network-Building” at the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing conference. Ehren's recently published book Communicating Mobility and Technology: A Material Rhetoric for Persuasive Transportation (Routledge) was reviewed in Communication Design Quarterly and IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication. Finally, he was recently interviewed about his work in the podcast 10 Minute Tech Comm.

Assistant Professor Ana Ribero is the 2017-18 Resident Research Fellow for the Center for the Humanities. Her accepted publications are, "Digital Art + Activism: A Focus on QTPOC Digital Environments as Rhetorical Gestures of Coalition and Un/Belonging", co-written with Adela C. Licona. Also published was Routledge Companion to Digital Writing & Rhetoric, edited by Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes, Routledge. "A Review of Alexandra Hidalgo’s Cámara Retórica" in Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture (volume info TBD).

Professor Emerita Laura Rice, served as faculty expert on Tunisia for the NEH summer institute Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia: The Voice of Women in Literature, Cinema and Other Arts since Independence, co-directed by French professors Joseph Krause and Nabil Boudraa, OSU; in September, in London, she participated in meetings at the Tunisian embassy, the Tunisian-British Chamber of Commerce, and with the Lord Mayor of London on international trade and education.

Distinguished Professor Emeritus David Robinson published a Blogpost entitled “Margaret Fuller and the Coming Democracy” on the Oxford University Press Blog. The article discusses the nineteenth century American author and activist Margaret Fuller and her role in the Italian battle for independence. The post is available at https://blog.oup.com/2017/08/margaret-fuller-democracy/.

Associate Professor Susan Jackson Rodgers published a novel titled This Must Be the Place. (DeKalb, IL: NIU Press/Switchgrass Books, 2017).
She will also be serving as the Western Council Chair on the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Board of Trustees.

Assistant Professor Elizabeth Sheehan published an essay "Now and Forever?: Fashion Magazines and the Temporality of the Interwar Period" in the collection Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918-1939 (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). At the Modernist Studies Association conference in August of 2017, she presented a paper on periodization in Virginia Woolf's Orlando and British fashion magazines and participated in a roundtable on "Modernism and Relevance." Her monograph, Modernism à la Mode: Fashion, Fiction, and the Ends of Literature will be published by Cornell University Press in 2018.

Assistant Professor Megan Ward, along with Adrian Wisnicki (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) completed a four-year, NEH-funded project to develop the digital archive Livingstone Online (www.livingstoneonline.org). The site now includes over critical framing essays, 12,000 manuscript images, extensive transcriptions, and spectral image analysis of one of Livingstone’s field diaries. It is the largest online resource of any British traveller to Africa. Adrian and Megan have given invited talks about the project at Edinburgh University, Oxford University, Queen’s University Belfast, and at McGill University for the DH2017 conference.

Professor Emeritus Robert Wess received in 2017 the "Lifetime Achievement Award" from the Kenneth Burke Society. His chapter in a book is coming out this fall from the Pennsylvania State University Press: "Burke's Counter-Nature: Posthumanism in the Anthropocene," pp. 80-97. Book's title: Kenneth Burke + The Posthuman. Book's editors: Chris Mays, Nathaniel A. Rivers, and Kellie Sharp-Hoskins.

Associate Professor Peter Betjemann’s article “The Ends of Time: Abolition, Apocalypse, and Narrativity in Robert S. Duncanson’s Literary Paintings” will come out in American Art 31:3 (Fall 2017). His article “The Course of War: John Quidor, Washington Irving, and the Deployment of Dutch History” appeared in the Hudson River Valley Review 33:2 (Spring 2017).

Instructor JT Bushnell was recently promoted to Senior Instructor 1. His short story, "The Commute," was also published in the online literary journal Monkeybicycle and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Emeritus Professor and SWLF Distinguished Professor Tracy Daugherty won the 2017 Oregon Book Award in nonfiction for his biography of Joan Didion: The Last Love Song.

Instructor Rob Drummond was an Honors College Outstanding Professor of the Year Award nominee and will also be leading a short-term study abroad trip to Lyon and Paris in June.

Emeritus Professor Lisa Ede published the fourth edition of her textbook The Academic Writer: A Brief Rhetoric (Bedford/St. Martin's) and the second edition of her coauthored textbook Everyone's An Author (W. W. Norton).

Instructor Gilad Elbom was recently promoted to Senior Instructor 1. Elbom also won the Honors College Outstanding Professor of the Year Award.

Professor Evan Gottlieb published his fourth monograph, Romantic Realities: Speculative Realism and British Romanticism, with Edinburgh University Press in fall 2016. He also published an article, “Reflections: Confessions of a Late-Blooming Theory-Head,” in Eighteenth-Century Fiction 29.1 (Fall 2016), and gave a talk on the literary history of utopia in January 2017 as part of the University of Oregon's Oregon Rare Books Initiative speaker series.

Associate Professor Karen Holmberg is a finalist for the Notting Hill Editions Essay Prize for the essay “’In My Head I Carry My Own Zoo’: the Collage Work of John Digby.” Her essay will be published in the award anthology, and she is traveling to London in late June for the unveiling of the grand prize winner.

Instructor Jillian Saint Jacques published an article entitled "Dangerous Dakini: Monet Clark's Bunny Girl and Other Precarious Performance Videos" in Afterimage 44.4 (January/February 2017). Jillian was interviewed in "Personal and Social Adaptations: An Interview with Jillian St. Jacques by Laurence Raw” in Linguaculture 7.1 56-58. He also presented a scholarly paper entitled “Up Against Dollo’s Law: False Turns, Devolution, and the Questionable Remainder in Sexual Subjectivation” for a panel on Adapting Divergent Cultures to Film at The Southwest Popular American Culture Association Conference in Albuquerque, NM, Feb. 16. Check out the interview with Jillian here.

Assistant Professor Tim Jensen has a new article, "Textbook Pathos: Tracing a Through-Line of Emotion in Composition Textbooks," in Composition Forum, part of a special issue dedicated to emotion in composition studies. Jensen also spoke to the value of curiosity and habit at the OSU fall convocation 2016.

Instructor Steve Kunert was awarded the Best Advisor of 2017 through the Orange Media Network.

Distinguished Professor Jon Lewis gave a talk on his latest book, Hard-Boiled Hollywood: Crime and Punishment in Postwar Los Angeles, printed by UC Press, at the Los Angeles Festival of Books.

Assistant Professor Elena Passarello's book, Animals Strike Curious Poses, was recently published by Sarabande Books and has received glowing reviews by the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, Tin House, and many more. Read the New York Times review here.She was also interviewed on NPR’s “The Takeaway” and on WCSH News which can be watched here.

Assistant Professor Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder recently published "Explain Like I’m Five: Technical Descriptions in the Wild" in the most recent issue of Technical Communication Quarterly,volume 26, no. 1 (2017): 25-41. Ehren also gave a presentation titled "Elusive Elegance in Data Displays" as part of the "Beautiful Science, Useful Art: Three Perspectives on Data Visualization" event hosted by the OSU Special Collections and Archives Research Center. His book Communicating Mobility and Technology: A Material Rhetoric for Persuasive Transportation was also recently published with Routledge.

Associate Professor Rebecca Olson’s book Arras Hanging: The Textile That Determined Early Modern Literature and Drama (University of Delaware Press, 2013) was issued in paperback.

Professor Emerita Laura Rice presented "Schehrazade and Sustainable Development", with Mounira Hejaiej, Sultan Qaboos University, Fatima Mernissi for Our Time, U-Berkeley, (October 7-8, 2016); she was one of 15 panelists for the "Experts' Workshop on Jobs and Employment", sponsored by The Maghreb Economic Forum, the BMW Foundation, and Global Project Partners e.V. Tunis (July 27-30, 2016); in summer 2017, she will serve as faculty expert on Tunisia at the 2017 NEH Summer Institute: Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia: The Voice of Women in Literature, Cinema and Other Arts since Independence at OSU.

Instructor Jennifer Richter’s new poetry collection No Acute Distress was named a 2017 Oregon Book Award Finalist.

Distinguished Professor Emeritus David Robinson presented two recent conference papers: “Transcendental Ordinary: Cavell from Thoreau to Emerson” at “American Literature and the Philosophical” in Paris on March 23, 2017; and “The Ecstatic and the Ordinary: Thoreau, Mountaintops, and Moonlight” at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California on April 8, 2017.

Associate Professor Susan Jackson Rodgers' upcoming novel This Must Be The Place was recently reviewed by Kirkus Reviews. Read the review here.

Professor Marjorie Sandor published a new short story, "A Letter of Complaint to Pushkin," in AGNI 85 (spring issue).

Professor Keith Scribner's short-short story "Level" (published in W.W. Norton's Flash Fiction Forward) was adapted into a short opera by Experiments in Opera and performed in May at Symphony Space in New York City. Read a review here.

Assistant Professor Elizabeth (Lily) Sheehan published an article "'This Great Work of the Creation of Beauty': Imagining Internationalism in W.E.B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess and Black Beauty Culture” in Mfs: Modern Fiction Studies 62.3 (Fall 2016): 412-443. In the fall she also presented a paper entitled “Modernist and Contemporary Methods: On Mood Work” and participated in a seminar on "Tracking Modernist Anxieties" at the annual Modernist Studies Association Conference. In addition, Lily gave an invited lecture on “Mood Work: Modernism and Methodology” as part of OSU’s School of Writing, Literature, and Film’s Critical Questions lecture series. In January of 2017 at the Modern Language Association Conference, she presented “Woolfian Haptics: Touching on Mood and Mode” and in March she was part of the Keynote Panel for the Transform/able Identity/ies Graduate Conference at OSU. In 2017, Lily also designed and led two pedagogy workshops: the first with Professors Megan Ward and Nana Osei-Kofi for SWLF faculty and graduate students and the second (by invitation) for faculty in the gender studies program at Lewis and Clark College. This June, she is participating in OSU's Difference, Power, and Discrimination summer institute for faculty.

Assistant Professor Megan Ward's co-edited a digital critical edition of David Livingstone’s final manuscripts (1866-73) with Adrian S. Wisnicki at Livingstone Online (www.livingstoneonline.org). Her new book Human Reproductions: Victorian Realist Character and Artificial Intelligence, will be published by Ohio State University Press in 2018.